In Shock: How nearly dying made me a better intensive care doctor review

In Shock: How nearly dying made me a better intensive care doctor review

3 /
5 stars

In Shock: How nearly dying made me a better intensive care doctor

"Despite being surrounded by every form and severity of disease, I had yet to learn what it meant to be sick," she says in the introduction to In Shock. Part memoir, part polemic, this is the story of how 10 years ago, her life was turned on its head after she suffered a catastrophic bleed in her abdomen.

Related articles

Awdish was in such agony she could hardly see but as she tried to explain what was happening, medical staff were not listening to her, pushing her to wear a foetal monitoring belt and provide a urine sample.

This was just the beginning of a nightmarish sequence of events.

The cause of the bleeding would not be discovered for months; a benign tumour in her liver had ruptured, causing extensive haemorrhaging.

Back in the labour ward, Awdish's condition deteriorated and as her blood pressure crashed, she was taken to the operating theatre where she was aware of people talking above her. "We're losing her... she's circling the drain here."

She points out that these could have been the last words she ever heard.

GETTY

Awdish's condition deteriorated and she was taken to the operating theatre.

Tragically, she lost her baby and remained so seriously ill that she was not expected to survive.

She underwent surgery to stop a second benign tumour from rupturing but the procedure caused further complications and she went into septic and anaphylactic shock.

Her slow recovery, with setbacks at every turn, forced her to revaluate both her own approach as a doctor but also the way medics are taught to relate to their patients.

"We aren't trained to see our patients. We are trained to see pathology," she says.

Awdish was frustrated by what she saw as indifferent treatment by the medical staff around her.

She blames the way doctors are trained and recognised a lot of the behaviour in the way she too has treated patients.

"We are taught to conceal our emotions and not to indulge the emotions of others," she says.

Awdish recalls a stint on a paediatrics ward as a medical student when she was rebuked by a senior doctor for being moved when a child died.

"If you feel close enough to mourn him, then you are irresponsible. How do you expect to care for the other children in your charge?" she was told.

This seems brutal but it is all part of the self-preservation deemed essential if doctors are to do their job without being clouded by sentiment.

GETTY

Self-preservation is essential if doctors are to do their job without being clouded by sentiment.

Awdish argues that this approach is not only damaging for the patient but for the doctor too.

"We're all broken in some way. Broken and haunted," she remarks bleakly.

The opening chapters of In Shock are both gripping and harrowing and Awdish makes some valid points about the doctor/patient relationship.

Her solution is for doctors to show more empathy, "to see the people beneath the transparent film of disease".

However, it is hard not to feel frustrated by her irritation with the medical staff who are, after all, battling to save her life.